A Warning: Facebook dating apps see massive user drop after FB policy change.

Those Facebook notifications were being abused to send your friends notifications that looked like normal Facebook notifications "You've been tagged in a photo", then in the event they were clicked it would do the same to their friends. I'm thrilled Facebook disabled them for applications.

We make Facebook apps for YouTube channels, and the removal of app notifications definitely hasn't hurt us. In fact, it may have even helped, as we are no longer getting lost in a pile of app spam. Our users actually want to be notified when new videos are available! Over 50% of them sign up for e-mail notifications, and slightly less than that get the notifications directly in their Feed. We don't trick them into doing this, and it is easy to opt out.

As long as you provide a service people actually want, I think you'll be safe regardless of what changes Facebook makes to its policies.

Developers were abusing notifications, and facebook decided to do right by their users and disable them. It should be lauded for putting its users' needs before those of its developers.

There's a spelling mistake in the last phrase. It should be:

This is why you don’t build companies that are completely dependent on spam.

The flip side is that you wouldn't have a company to begin with without Facebook and you probably made some money in the initial gold rush.

Facebook is also partnering with Zynga for some dating thing. So the lesson here is that you don't want to build on a platform that isn't making money and can only make money by competing directly with platform adopters.

protip from someone that slogged through the trenches of the social app boom: Don't spam your users. If the effectively-zero click-through-rate doesn't hurt you, then the channel controller (facebook) will shut down the spam vector.

Or: Don't be a dick to your users. Make something of value and send messages when you have real content.

I think the only _great_ dating app is okcupid, which is only really just starting to touch upon using facebook.

Making it harder for apps to spam users, will actually benefit the fb platform as a whole. I actually think they're mostly doing a good job, given most project sponsor's initial thoughts around gaining users are to try and spam all existing users as much as possible, and then try and import all their contacts. There was quite a bit of this in the early fb days, but not so much now. This is a good thing.

Now, how to write an effective dating app? How to get women using a dating app. These are the real challenges. P.o.F. is an ok site that I've used in the past, but always felt it could be better. Though I guess if you've got a steady income stream, you're more worried about breaking it, and loosing an income, than innovating. Have you thought of doing a sister site or two?

From Markus' post

"This is why you don’t build companies that are completely dependent on the whim of another company."

Of course, an advertising supported dating site who's revenue comes primarily from Adsense doesn't come under this sweeping generalisation does it...

This was particularly annoying as there is a replacement on the horizon, but not yet available. There is theoretically going to be application -> inbox which will be more useful in many cases, but its got this amorphous release date that they won't pin down.

the graph is a bit misleading, If you look at the daily count there is a massive drop and then it stays fairly consistent afterwards.